Performance of a new combination of blood culture vials in sepsis detection: a 2-year retrospective comparison

The diagnosis of bloodstream infection requires the optimum combination of media in an automated blood culture system for maximum recovery of pathogens with the earliest time to detection. In a previous work, we showed that for patients admitted to the Emergency Department of our hospital, the combination of BACTEC lytic anaerobic and BACTEC aerobic vials was more efficient than BACTEC anaerobic and BACTEC aerobic vial. In this study, we extended the work including a broader patient population, representative of all hospital. A total of 8629 cultures were collected during the pre-lytic phase, from 01 July 2013 to 30 June 2014 and 7940 cultures during the post-lytic phase, ranged from 01 July 2015 to 30 June 2016. The number of positive blood cultures was higher during the post-lytic phase (19.74%) than in the pre-lytic phase (17.52%), particularly for Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus spp., Enterococcus spp., and anaerobes. We also observed a significant decreased of the time to detection, with the mean and median in the post-lytic phase of 17.68 and 13.05 h compared with 19.49 and 14.47 h in the pre-lytic phase. Whereas the time to detection was the same for organisms recovered in the aerobic Plus bottles for both time periods, time to detection for the anaerobic lytic bottles was significantly faster than with the anaerobic Plus bottles. This study carried out on a long time observation reported that a simple modification of composition of blood culture set could lead to better results in bloodstream infection detection.